Jim Brown reviewed Ulysses Jenkins by Ulysses Jenkins
Well-Done Exhibition Book
This is a nice encapsulation of an exhibition that run at the Hammer Museum in 2022. The show was the first to focus on Ulysses Jenkins work, a mural and video artist from Los Angeles. The book has some great essays and a roundtable about Jenkins' work.
The best essay is by Aria Dean, who takes on how Jenkins' work deals with race and representation. She offers a reading that goes beyond the typical understanding of Jenkins work - that he's offering a fairly simple critique of racist representations of Blackness (especially his work "Mass of Images"). Dean offers a much more interesting reading of Jenkins' work suggesting that a close look at Jenkins' work in the 1970s and 1980s reveals "a narrative unfolding, one that originates in Jenkins's massive failure to assert a legible ontology of himself as a black subject, capable of wreaking havoc over the images imposed …
This is a nice encapsulation of an exhibition that run at the Hammer Museum in 2022. The show was the first to focus on Ulysses Jenkins work, a mural and video artist from Los Angeles. The book has some great essays and a roundtable about Jenkins' work.
The best essay is by Aria Dean, who takes on how Jenkins' work deals with race and representation. She offers a reading that goes beyond the typical understanding of Jenkins work - that he's offering a fairly simple critique of racist representations of Blackness (especially his work "Mass of Images"). Dean offers a much more interesting reading of Jenkins' work suggesting that a close look at Jenkins' work in the 1970s and 1980s reveals "a narrative unfolding, one that originates in Jenkins's massive failure to assert a legible ontology of himself as a black subject, capable of wreaking havoc over the images imposed on him, and ends with an abandonment of this pursuit. By the end of this period, Jenkins – in a semi-linear progression – has moved away from grappling with the slippage between the black subject and its representation and toward a non-ontological blackness, or what he deems a new black universalism." (42)